Welcome to the LinuxFocus September/October 2001
issue

Democracy, government by the people? At least this is
what the Greek word originally meant but where are we today? For
the USA we should probably say that Democracy is where money rules.
It looks like the "right" to make profit becomes increasingly more
important than the freedom to exchange ideas and information. Dmitry Sklyarov is facing
charges higher than armed robbers and child molesters. What did he
do? He wrote a piece of software that had the potential to reduce
the profit of Adobe and other companies. The device is still legal
in most countries and was legal until one year ago in the US.
It would allow you to do with E-books what you can do today with
paper books in any print-shop around the corner: copy pages from a
book.

Big corporations are managing to get laws in place that have the
potential to severely restrict everybody's freedom and allow a few
individuals to make enormous profits.

Just a few centuries ago people, science and the whole society was
suffering because a few monarchs and dictators had everything and
could do anything. Are we heading back in that direction?

How is it possible that laws which restrict the freedom to exchange
digital speech are being put in place?

It increases extremely the profit of very few individuals and
they are very eager to push such laws through.

Computers are fairly new and most people still can't relate
to thoughts written down as software and digital information and
speech.

Speakup, it's time to make everybody aware of the damages that this
will do to the society and everybody's freedom. It is very likely
that you will not be making any profit on stricter copyright,
patent ... etc laws.

The LinuxFocus Tip

How to copy a whole tree of files and directories?
Apart from using a filemanager (like e.g mc, ...) you can use the
following commands. All of them copy the current directory ("."),
including subdirectories, into a destination directory:

cp -Rpv . /some/destdir
Disadvantage: It fails on special files such as the files in
/dev